Why does the web need to change?

If we continue to power our websites, applications, digital tools, archives, and data collections with non-renewable energy, we are contributing to the warming of the planet.

How can you make a difference?

Here’s the incredible thing: compared to architecting green transportation and engineering heat-resilient crops, it’s not very hard to green our data. There are many things we all can do to to make sure that the apps we build, the data we share, and the sites we visit are both people-friendly and planet-friendly.

What can you do?

Business Owners

Use green hosting for websites and apps

Work with a sustainability advisor

Consider joining the B Corp movement

Designers and Developers

Discuss data usage with your clients and colleagues

Use less code and create clear page budgets

Review page bloat on older websites and applications

Sustainability Executives

Work with stakeholders to demand hosting providers go green

Take data usage into account for assessing carbon footprints

Support Greenpeace's work in evaluating internet energy demands

App Developers and Engineers

Check products consistently for performance improvements

Use a CDN to deploy content and assets whenever possible

Help support the development of green hosting platforms

Renewables

Wind

Kaheawa Wind Power is one of the largest wind farms in Hawaii. It is located on the island of Maui above the town of Maalaea in the West Maui Mountains and serves 18,700 homes.

Sun

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is the world’s largest solar thermal power plant. It is located in the California Mojave Desert and has a a gross capacity of 392 megawatts (MW).

Water

Hoover Dam can produce over 2,000 megawatts of capacity and a yearly average generation of 4.5 billion kilowatt hours to serve the annual electrical needs of nearly 8 million people in Arizona, southern California, and southern Nevada.

Earth

The Svartsengi Power Station is an Icelandic geothermal power plant that is located in the Svartsengi geothermal field. It is the only heating system for the local district on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which pipes hot geothermal water to more than 21,000 households.

Our Responsibility

Want to take some immediate action but don’t know where to start?

Here are five things that we recommend:

1

Find a green host for your site or application. There are a lot of them out there. This site is powered by a host that only powers its servers with electricity from renewable energy sources (in Iceland) and works to achieve high energy utilization efficiency levels. You can learn more about renewable-powered and carbon-neutralized hosts at the Green Web Foundation.

Petition your website host to adapt to standards and transparency in green hosting. As we consciously create a more sustainable planet, every business will need a reliable, standards-based, visible, and user-friendly set of tools to determine whether their websites and applications are being powered by renewable or polluting energy.

4

Ask your designers, developers, engineers, and CTO about how your data is being served and whether performance and efficiencies are measured. Are your servers powered by green energy? If not, why not?

5

Get in touch with us. We are looking to build a global community of folks who care about the web’s impact on our environment and its contribution to climate change.